As a nondestructive method, optical inspection is the preferred method in several latent fingerprint detection methods. In the face of increasingly complex application scenes, the traditional optical inspection method is often ineffective. However, the polarization imaging detection not only can obtain the intensity and spectral information of a target, but also can obtain the polarization information such as polarization degree and polarization angle etc reflecting the surface details of the target. By use of the advantages of polarization imaging, the research on polarization imaging detection of latent fingerprints based on active polarized light is carried out. The fingerprint image data is obtained and analyzed. The result shows that compared with the common light intensity imaging, the method can obtain higher quality latent fingerprint images. The images are clearer and have more detail information.